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cosmolinguist(I am having a bad day, so rather than writing about that, here's something I prepared earlier. I'ts the latest thing I sent to the Graun's science-writing contest and never heard anything back about. I quite like it, though.)
Imagine the Sun, Moon and planets do revolve around the Earth. (Almost. They revolve around points called equants, which are near the Earth but different for each heavenly body. These arbitrary points are chosen for a good reason: to make the maths work out.)
In this universe, planets are held in their orbits by magnetism. Comets are repelled from the Sun by magnetism. The Earth formed out of material ejected by the Sun when a comet hit it. Or perhaps comets are local atmospheric phenomena, not even as far away as the Moon.
The whole Earth was originally covered in water, which has been receding ever since. Some stones mimic the appearance of plants and animal life, perhaps because plants are a way of turning water into solid matter: as they decay, the water leaves them and they become rocks.
Atoms might be useful for calculations, but they're not real; there would have to be nothing but empty space between them and the void is an abhorrent idea. There is instead a “universal fluid” permeating everything, whose swirling eddies push the planets along in their orbits. Vision is caused by things pressing on the universal fluid between it and your eyes...which means you can see in the dark if you run fast enough!
Just as sound travels in air or ocean waves travel through water, light travels through the aether.
Blood is manufactured in the liver, carried by veins, and absorbed by the body's tissues, so the body needs to constantly produce new blood. Veins and arteries carry two different substances, which is why they're different colours.
Characteristics can be developed by an individual plant or animal and passed on to its offspring: a giraffe that's stretched its neck to reach higher leaves on trees has longer-necked descendants. An animal can even develop whole new organs if the need arises! And these new developments are always beneficial.
In this world, light travels at infinite speed, everything possesses caloric (which flows out of something when its temperature rises), maggots arise spontaneously from meat itself, earthquakes are caused by atmospheric disturbances, phlogiston escapes from anything that is burning. and Saturn sometimes grows bulges that look like ears (other times, the ears cannot be seen).
This strange world exists not in quaint folk tales, bad sci-fi or ignorant superstition. These are all ideas that were at some point held widely or prominently by the best scientific thinkers in the West.
I love to contemplate the dead ends, cul-de-sacs, wrong turns and diversions in the history of science because they're good illustrations of what a human endeavour science is, and that I am not as different or distant from great scientists as I might think...or as my poor grades in maths would indicate.
Indeed, it's some consolation that several famous scientists have been poor students as well. Some were just poor. Some suffered from poor health. Some were a disappointment to their parents, members of unpopular religious or ethnic minorities...or, in too-few cases, members of the unpopular majority of womanhood. Some slept with other people's wives. Some trained in other subjects or had no academic training at all. Some had wildly unrelated jobs (my favourite is Edmond Halley, who was a sea captain and delighted in being called Captain Halley long before he could be called Dr Halley).
That great scientists are just as petty, fallible and human as the rest of us has been one of the great revelations of my adult life. In school, my science textbooks might fleetingly mention the namesake of an equation, a law or a unit of measurement, but there was never any sense that science was done by people who had personalities and lives. One of the ways I think those human traits really come to life is in the mistaken ideas that are prevalent in each era.
My science books inundated me with stories of innovation and achievement that followed one another as inexorably as one paragraph followed another. This gives a misleading view of scientific progress as inevitable, like the wars and kings that parade with depressing inevitability through history books.
I might spot scientists' superceded ideas only in a footnote or a parenthetical remark like “...and not, as was widely believed until that time...” They're worth seeking out, because the awareness that previous explanations have been replaced with better ones also encourages us to call our modern explanations just that – “modern”, not ultimate or perfect. We benefit from the accumulated wisdom of our predecessors and present-day science is making great strides, but our era is no less full of mistakes than any previous one. I can't wait to find out what they are.
Imagine the Sun, Moon and planets do revolve around the Earth. (Almost. They revolve around points called equants, which are near the Earth but different for each heavenly body. These arbitrary points are chosen for a good reason: to make the maths work out.)
In this universe, planets are held in their orbits by magnetism. Comets are repelled from the Sun by magnetism. The Earth formed out of material ejected by the Sun when a comet hit it. Or perhaps comets are local atmospheric phenomena, not even as far away as the Moon.
The whole Earth was originally covered in water, which has been receding ever since. Some stones mimic the appearance of plants and animal life, perhaps because plants are a way of turning water into solid matter: as they decay, the water leaves them and they become rocks.
Atoms might be useful for calculations, but they're not real; there would have to be nothing but empty space between them and the void is an abhorrent idea. There is instead a “universal fluid” permeating everything, whose swirling eddies push the planets along in their orbits. Vision is caused by things pressing on the universal fluid between it and your eyes...which means you can see in the dark if you run fast enough!
Just as sound travels in air or ocean waves travel through water, light travels through the aether.
Blood is manufactured in the liver, carried by veins, and absorbed by the body's tissues, so the body needs to constantly produce new blood. Veins and arteries carry two different substances, which is why they're different colours.
Characteristics can be developed by an individual plant or animal and passed on to its offspring: a giraffe that's stretched its neck to reach higher leaves on trees has longer-necked descendants. An animal can even develop whole new organs if the need arises! And these new developments are always beneficial.
In this world, light travels at infinite speed, everything possesses caloric (which flows out of something when its temperature rises), maggots arise spontaneously from meat itself, earthquakes are caused by atmospheric disturbances, phlogiston escapes from anything that is burning. and Saturn sometimes grows bulges that look like ears (other times, the ears cannot be seen).
This strange world exists not in quaint folk tales, bad sci-fi or ignorant superstition. These are all ideas that were at some point held widely or prominently by the best scientific thinkers in the West.
I love to contemplate the dead ends, cul-de-sacs, wrong turns and diversions in the history of science because they're good illustrations of what a human endeavour science is, and that I am not as different or distant from great scientists as I might think...or as my poor grades in maths would indicate.
Indeed, it's some consolation that several famous scientists have been poor students as well. Some were just poor. Some suffered from poor health. Some were a disappointment to their parents, members of unpopular religious or ethnic minorities...or, in too-few cases, members of the unpopular majority of womanhood. Some slept with other people's wives. Some trained in other subjects or had no academic training at all. Some had wildly unrelated jobs (my favourite is Edmond Halley, who was a sea captain and delighted in being called Captain Halley long before he could be called Dr Halley).
That great scientists are just as petty, fallible and human as the rest of us has been one of the great revelations of my adult life. In school, my science textbooks might fleetingly mention the namesake of an equation, a law or a unit of measurement, but there was never any sense that science was done by people who had personalities and lives. One of the ways I think those human traits really come to life is in the mistaken ideas that are prevalent in each era.
My science books inundated me with stories of innovation and achievement that followed one another as inexorably as one paragraph followed another. This gives a misleading view of scientific progress as inevitable, like the wars and kings that parade with depressing inevitability through history books.
I might spot scientists' superceded ideas only in a footnote or a parenthetical remark like “...and not, as was widely believed until that time...” They're worth seeking out, because the awareness that previous explanations have been replaced with better ones also encourages us to call our modern explanations just that – “modern”, not ultimate or perfect. We benefit from the accumulated wisdom of our predecessors and present-day science is making great strides, but our era is no less full of mistakes than any previous one. I can't wait to find out what they are.
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-28 04:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-28 04:39 pm (UTC)I had a lot of fun writing this.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-28 03:43 pm (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5dSyT50Cs8
The 'ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance'. The openness to changing your mind on scientific truth if better evidence comes along.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-30 06:19 pm (UTC)Also, I love "American Wedding" :)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-30 06:48 pm (UTC)It was a lot of fun to go through my big book on the history of western science since Galileo to find these examples of wrong ideas and the humanity of scienctists.
And yeah, I love Gogol Bordello and perhaps particularly this song because I so detested my own American wedding.